It’s a frustrating paradox: Modern women today, though more liberated than ever, are often deeply unhappy.

Patriarchalists jump on the high rates of mental illness, anxiety, and stress in the modern woman as their proof that “trying to be like men” and subverting the biologically rooted, divinely given gender hierarchy is a futile project. Women feel this way too, resenting either the pressure to be mothers and homemakers or the pressure to be out in the workforce in order to be a woman. Who among us hasn’t experienced shaming at the hands of a feminist or a patriarchalist because of her work and family choices?

I often feel assailed by both feminism and patriarchalism in my attempts to construct a personhood. I am often confused about how stubbornly anti-woman I am according to someone else’s view of womanhood. According to one view, I am too outspoken, career-driven, and self-centered to be a true woman. According to another, I am too traditional, stereotypical, and family-centered to be a true woman.

I am not surprised that there is a vast number of women who resent both feminism and patriarchy, borrowing ideologies from each without claiming the labels. But even in this No Woman’s Land, we feel guilty, tired, and frustrated with our concept of womanhood, and wonder if conforming more to an ideal — either ideal — will bring relief. They seem so confident, the women dedicated to the idea that God desires women at home, with numerous children, serving their husbands’ vision. They seem so certain, the women insisting that a woman’s influence is best used outside the home, breaking barriers and stereotypes as much as possible.

This is the problem with gender.

I firmly believe in the reality of biological sex. That’s not what I mean when I say “gender.” By “gender,” I refer to a conception of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman, based on biological sex differences but not necessitated by them. Examples: men are made for war because of the average man is physically stronger than the average woman; women’s ultimate purpose is motherhood because most women can bear children.

Gender includes these overarching purpose statements, as well as corollary statements meant to enforce them, like pink is a girls’ color, or real men don’t cry. Gender insists that there are two different kinds of people: men and women, who are more dissimilar than similar, who come from two different planets, who fulfill different and fixed purposes, roles, and functions in society. In order to be the best version of ourselves, gender tells us, we must honor and celebrate our gender differences.

This sounds right. We can point to the statistical differences between men and women, and swap anecdotes to discover that our husbands all have the same annoying traits, or that our wives all go crazy during their periods. Women want this. Men want that. Women are this way. Men are that way. We have too many moments of staring dumbfounded at the opposite sex to believe any nonsense that there aren’t innate differences within both sexes.

In all our confidence about gender differences, however, there is deep insecurity and unhappiness. There comes a point in all our lives when gender stops being descriptive and starts feeling prescriptive — when its “biological realities” stop making sense to who we are as individuals or even genders, and starts limiting what we suspect are our true natures.

When I first got into Christian patriarchy and the world of stay-at-home daughters, so much made sense to me. I didn’t resonate with the lifestyle in its particulars — the homemaking, the long dresses, the ban on rock music, the indentured servitude to daddy — as much as I resonated with its goals. Figuring out the Bible? A close relationship with a father figure? And most importantly, a clear, practical, detailed account on how to be a Christian woman? Sign. me. up.

As I grew older and approached graduation, however, I peered into my future and recoiled at the idea of me foregoing college and sitting at home all day doing chores, handicrafts, and nothing. I loved academics. I hated homemaking. I wanted to go to college. I wanted a job. And I still wanted to marry and be a stay-at-home mother for a time. The lifestyle I once found informative and liberating felt oppressive, and I needed out.

Many stay-at-home daughters trying to rationalize their discomfort — i.e., me — talked about how God didn’t design a cookie cutter womanhood. He wanted to use all our gifts. He wanted us to be the women he designed us to be. The problem was, we all assumed that women shared a universal femininity.We shared a gendered ideal that we tried to expand as much as possible to accommodate individuality, while still maintaining the boundaries of womanhood (at home, under a man’s protection, wearing clothes tight enough to show you’re a woman and loose enough to prove you’re a lady).

Ironically, a cookie cutter is the perfect description of the problem of gender. The gender cookie cutter cuts into the dough, entrapping some dough within while excluding the extra dough. What’s within, we’re told, is womanhood. Anything outside the cookie cutter is nonessential at best or detrimental at worst. Gender cookie cutters come in all shapes and sizes, some more accommodating than others.

We’re taught to view our personhood through the lens of gender — or to extend to cookie metaphor, to look at only the dough within the cookie cutter. Before we can understand ourselves as humans or individuals, we must acknowledge and understand ourselves as women.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We all need to start somewhere in figuring out who we are. As children, we naturally categorized the world and picked up on our culture’s cues that gender differences were a big thing. We made observations from individuals (real or fictional) and extrapolated what men and women as a whole were like: only girls wore dresses, and trucks were boy toys, and only women drank coffee, and all daddies watched football.

Instead of questioning the soundness of our observations or asking whether we fit these stereotypes, we constructed our sense of self in relationship to gender, in an attempt to fit in with our social groups. We either defined ourselves positively with femininity (however our group defined it) or negatively.

In elementary years, there’s little crossover between masculinity and femininity. In order to play with the boys, girls must play boy things. In order to find a social home in the boys’ group, girls must reject not only femininity but the girls’ group themselves. This is where we get labels like “one of the guys” or “not like other girls.”

My point is, we are born into a highly divided, gendered world. The individual gender cookie cutters might differ in what it encloses and excludes (the modern feminine cookie cutter now involves some traditionally masculine things), but gender still defines our social worlds. We first learn our identities as individuals and humans through associating or disassociating with some form of femininity. We are women first before we are individuals — whether we recognize it or not.

Most of us don’t recognize that gender limits and defines our individuality. Instead of liberating ourselves from gender altogether, we edit the boundaries of gender (“I believe women should be homemakers, but perhaps God calls some women to the workforce” — or vice versa) or swap out entire frameworks of gender that pit traits against each other (the stay-at-home mom life versus the career mom life, a meek and quiet spirit versus the Jezebel spirit, a desire for equality versus submissiveness).

Gender limits us in two ways. The most obvious is in what it excludes. We begin to realize that our concept of femininity doesn’t include our own or other women’s traits. We see that, well, we do care about work other than homemaking, or we do care about contributing financially, or we do possess a gift of leadership, sometimes and often alongside of caring about home and family.

But in our gendered world, many people still see those as “masculine” things. Instead of recognizing that these are “feminine” things, insofar as some women are innately capable of and driven to do and be these things, we ask that women borrow from masculinity as an “exception to the general rule.” Women can bring these masculine traits into their own personal lives, but they don’t change the gender cookie cutter much, if at all. They can be a part of their personhood, but not their womanhood. And in a gendered world, personhood is secondary to womanhood.

That leads me to the second way gender limits us: it emphasizes what’s within the gender cookie cutter as most important and innate to women. Like I said above, we’re okay with women borrowing masculinity, as long as women still place equal or greater importance on femininity. We must care about our beauty, we must tend to the home and the children first, we must keep our husbands (and all men) happy and think of them in how we dress (modest but sexy), act (nurturing but not hysterical), and work (competent but not threatening).

Modern womanhood is a balancing act between our “innate” femininity and our masculine add-ons.Every concept of gender sets the line in the sand when, crossed over, a woman ceases to be a woman, and thus ceases to be a whole person in touch with her nature. Christian patriarchy scares women into submission with the threat of “androgyny.” Secular society accepts women who “act like men,” but they then wonder why lesbians and bisexual women more comfortable with male attire (like the wonderful Hannah Gadsby) don’t just out themselves as transgender men.

Whether eschewing feminine styles and attitudes, bowing out of exhausting beauty maintenance, or using talents outside of traditional women’s roles — there comes a point where a woman exits the gender box and becomes the opposite sex, or unsexed altogether.

This is why the liberated modern woman feels so disjointed and tired about her self and her place in this world: she is still obligated, either by society or by her own unexamined beliefs, to meet all the feminine requirements within her gender box, as well as any masculine elements she resonates with or must meet per her role. She feels guilty for not fulfilling obligations she doesn’t even agree with or for not being interested in things that, frankly, don’t interest her. Her mind is filled with detailed do’s and don’ts about things she naturally doesn’t care about.

Because most individuals and society at large still believe in the innateness of gender, it doesn’t cross her mind to throw out some of these obligations, tasks, interests, and roles — or if it does cross her mind, she fears losing her womanhood, and thus her personhood.

Take the women’s magazines, for example, that allegedly cater to the modern woman’s interests. Apparently, we’re primarily interested in the proper washing of our bras and the care and keeping of our cuticles; we’re worried about our wrinkles and flyaways and the mud stains on the lower half of the entryway door; we feel most relaxed when we take time for bubble baths and keeping an impeccably clean and decorated home; we’re passionate about creating fun summer camps to keep the kids busy and making sure our dogs eat only the best kibble and that our husbands split the housework fairly but they don’t, so, what to do about that?

Our feminine obligations make us feel exposed as moral failures: if it’s a big enough deal for one woman or several women or a whole subscription of women to worry about, then everybody’s going to be looking at our cuticles and activity schedule and entryway doors. Do the majority of women actually care about these things? I don’t, and I bet many of us don’t, but the pressure to look competent in our roles as homemaker, mother, husband, and employee as defined by “womanhood” — the pressure we describe as “having it all” — drives us forward.

Some people think these drives to care about body and families in such specific and meaningless ways are innate, and our inability to fulfill these drives is evidence that women need to drop “masculine” traits and work as distractions.

But I bet if women stopped for a second; identified what belief or obligation lay under their guilt; asked themselves if they truly, personally care about being successful or even interested in certain things expected of women; threw out the goals that femininity pressed on them; and were then supported in fulfilling the goals and interests that mattered most to them, that we would be much, much happier. (This is the premise of Erin Falconer’s book, How to Get Sh*t Done: Why Women Need to Stop Doing Everything So They Can Achieve Anything.)

I think women experience the pressure to have it all in a way men don’t, but the problem with gender plagues men, as well. I hear men talking about the expectations of manhood that they must achieve in order to be accepted and respected in male-dominated areas and the confusion about what women want from them (a confusion that stems from women’s own confusion about women want, no doubt). It sounds exhausting, frustrating, and constricting.

So I propose a new way of looking at gender: get rid of it. Get rid of the gender cookie cutters that emphasize in individuals things that not all men and women believe or care about and excise the things they do believe and care about. Instead, let’s make the dough the entire spread of human traits, without the categories of “masculine” and “feminine.”

And then let’s make the individuals the cookie cutters, each a unique shape that captures the human traits best suited to them and their beliefs, and excludes the rest as non-essential or counterproductive. Humanity would always be equally available to both men and women. Even if males statistically tended to share certain bends and lines that females statistically didn’t, the individual would not be bound to statistical masculinity or femininity: he or she could shape, expand, or shrink their cookie cutter as they grow in knowledge of what it is to be a person — a personhood that is defined in part by biological maleness and femaleness, but is not constricted by it.

This quote nails everything that is wrong with patriarchy, anti-feminism, and even part of liberal feminism today. It promotes a narrative that there are chiefly two kinds of people: men, and women. In this limited taxonomy of all humanity, personality traits, interests, work, and spheres of influence divide neatly into “masculine” and “feminine.” Any time a man or a woman expresses interests or personality outside of this gender binary, or any time a man or a woman pursues a different kind of work or the same work in a different sphere of influence (say, a NICU nurse wanting to be a stay-at-home dad or a women’s Bible teacher stepping into a pastoral role), he or she is said to be outside his or her male or female nature. He is doing what women were created to do. She is doing what men were created to do.

Since there isn’t a huge stampede of men wanting to watch babies and be pre-k teachers and manage the home, we see experience this as a uniquely female transgression — women are constantly trying to be like men.

Poor women. It’s all feminism’s fault, really. Feminism has confused women about who they are. Women feel like they can’t be valued as women; they feel pressured to be like men. That’s why we’ve got all these women abandoning their children to the godless public schools and struggling with the double curse of parenthood and breadwinning. That’s why women can’t have it all: they’re trying to be men as well as women. If only our culture would affirm the uniqueness of women, women would stop being so confused and burned out.

Let me say this loudly and slowly, because most people just don’t get it: Women are not trying to be men. They are trying to be themselves.

They are not busting their butts off at work only to come home and almost single-handedly raise the kids and take care of the house just to “prove” something. They are not spending time, money, and effort in earning Bible and theology degrees they’re barred from using just because they thought it would be a spot of fun. Their pursuit of work in spheres and roles prohibited them are not feminist side hobbies, just to keep them “busy.” They struggle for banned opportunities not because they are duty-bound by the feminist agenda to take over men’s jobs, but because this is who they are as women.

This is their uniqueness. That “man’s job” is this particular woman’s job. That “thing men were created to do” — this particular woman was created to do it.

This is how it has always been. These modern women interested in “men’s pursuits” are not feminism’s Frankenstein, a grotesque amalgamation of masculine and feminine traits zapped to life by hatred of their “unique feminine natures.” They are the most natural, normal, and unadulterated creation: women.

Women (and men, for the record) have always naturally been a mix of traits, skills, interests, and callings that run up and down the masculine/feminine spectrum, sometimes congregating more towards the “masculine” end, some more to the “feminine,” some in the center, and some spread out in both directions. Tell me a person’s sex, male or female, and I can tell you only what they’ve been told they are — not who they are actually.

Women have always been interested in things beyond home and family life. Women have always been intelligent. Women have always possessed “masculine” traits. Women have always possessed “masculine” skills. Women have always been capable of a “man’s job,” because it was never only men’s to begin with. They were her unique interests, capacities, traits, skills, and callings too.

Women are not trying to prove that they can do what men can do. They’re trying to prove that they can do what women do — and that we’re not one wit less of a woman or more like a man in doing it.

Since I shared in intense detail the overwhelming experience of mothering a newborn, I thought I’d share a peek into a much more rewarding time of motherhood. I might be the only mom on earth who never wants to go back to the newborn stage. Yeah, itty bitty babies are the cutest, but I can’t function without sleep or with a nonexistent schedule, and I struggled with the limitations of an immobile baby. And newborns are hard, because they demand so much without responding.

Now that e.e. smiles and babbles and pulls his version of practical jokes on me, I finally can feel a connection. And now that I get enough sleep every night, I actually do feel it.

I love our mornings together. He wakes up somewhere between 4:30-6:00 AM for a morning feed. I gave up trying to designate a specific wake time, but I put him back to sleep if he wakes up before six. We hang out in bed, whispering, playing peek-a-boo with the covers, and annoying Daddy who valiantly sleeps in until past seven. We chat and giggle, and he scratches my face and pulls my hair and steps in my eye. That, and finally admitting that it’s a reasonable time to get out of bed, gets me up. I throw on a robe and make my coffee.

Caffeine doesn’t make a difference to me, but I like the ritual of something sweet and warm every morning (no black coffee for me!). Plus, coffee draws me into the kitchen and motivates me to make breakfast. Whether or not I actually make breakfast depends on if he slept through the whole night or woke fitfully every two hours from teething pain. Since he still gets all his nutrition from breastmilk, I’m not as rigid about regular meals. And I rarely eat breakfast myself. I know. Bad mom. I’m just so slow in the morning, and I hate cooking.

To accommodate my lack of cooking motivation, I’ve got his breakfast routine down to a simple formula of grains, berries, and fruit. Normally I make porridge fingers or banana pancakes ahead of time and just toss one in the microwave each morning. That way I only have to muster up the energy to cook once every two weeks or so. Then I cut up some sort of berry and fruit (banana or clementine, usually, though I bought plums this week).

I drink my coffee at the table and toss food onto his tray while he feeds himself. We started baby-led weaning (a UK term for eating solids) at six months old. Once we got over the initial terror of choking (which he’s never done), it was smooth sailing. I love baby-led weaning — less cooking, more time eating my own food, and great entertainment. e.e. has developed quite a diverse and demanding appetite. He eats anything, and anytime he sees anybody else eating something, he protests loudly until the person in question caves. Not unlike a begging puppy, actually. His pincer skills are incredible, and he regulates how much food he ought to put in his mouth all on his own.

After a quick swipe with the wash cloth, I ignore the messy booster chair and release e.e. to play while I finish my coffee. Normally he’s independent in the early mornings, and I read or stare into space while he explores within my peripheral vision. But I follow his lead: if he needs cuddles, we snuggle, sing, and read books until he crawls away, ready to explore.

I am a huge, huge advocate of babies playing independently, for their sake and for parents’ sanity. The paradoxical way of infant independence is connecting when baby wants to connect so that he feels attached and satisfied enough to go explore. I never demand that e.e. play by himself; I just connect when he wants to chat or snuggle, and I don’t interrupt him when he’s doing his own thing.

Getting off my soapbox, we enjoy our morning until an hour-and-a-half after his wake up. We follow a flexible schedule based on wake times, and I adhere to it religiously. Our day falls apart if he doesn’t get enough sleep! He takes a long morning nap (1-2 hours), leaving me plenty of time to shower, get ready for the day, and clean. (I usually read or write, to be honest. Like I said: bad mom.)

For some reason, he needs more cuddles after this morning nap. We read one of the library board books obsessively curated for maximum social awareness and diversity. We sing some songs. I bounce him on my knee. I’m likely still not dressed at this point.

On Tuesdays we go to library storytime, where e.e. ignores all the colorful toys and inspects the perimeter of the room. He’ll crawl back to snuggle up with one of the adult strangers or use an infant as a stepstool. We’re making great progress with safe socialization and personal boundaries. /sarcasm

He goes back to sleep two hours after his morning nap and sleeps for an hour, waking up when Daddy comes home for lunch. 95% of the time I’m dressed (unless I’m really involved in a blog post), so we play outside or take a walk to a park. Ideally, I want him to get some outdoor time every day. Practically, I get fed up with digging dirt, leaves, and wood chips out of his mouth and sometimes we come in early.

I love our outdoor time, though. It’s fun to see the world through his wondering eyes, and there’s no pressure to be active or exercise. I just sit and think (or not think). It’s done a world of good for my mental health and creativity.

Two and a half hours after his late morning nap, he goes to sleep again. My mother- or grandmother-in-law watches him for an hour while I go to work at my preschool for a couple hours, and then Erich comes home. e.e. reportedly sits up all excited when he hears the door open. He adores his daddy.

I get off around 6:15 PM and come home to a baby eager for snuggles and boobies. We’ll go outside again, maybe eat dinner if our lives are put together enough, or hang out in our apartment. When 7 PM rolls around, we go through our quick bedtime routine: pjs (sometimes), a lullaby, and our goodnight ritual borrowed from my granddad and punctuated by lots of kisses: “Good night! Sleep tight! Don’t let the bed bugs bite. Scrambo! Hasta mañana! I love you!” Then I kiss his cheek with his bunny lovey: “Here’s lovey!” And then I’ll kiss his cheek with his puppy lovey: “Here’s other lovey!” Then I’ll blow him one last kiss (unless I lose all self-control and smooch his chunky cheeks again) and close the door.

Unless he’s overtired (in which case he might cry for 5-10 minutes — getting off schedule makes a gigantic difference!), he’ll babble to himself before drifting off to sleep until around 6 AM the next morning.

See? Motherhood isn’t all chaos. I wish my sleep-deprived newborn mom self could have seen this coming — these lazy mornings and those rested nights, and this giggly, snuggly, adventurous eight-month-old.

We Christians are in quite a pickle with this speaking-truth-in-love business.

We care deeply about the truth, and we care deeply about love, and since God’s truth leads to life, we thus conclude that the most loving thing we can do is to share it. Everybody else, even our fellow Christians, has reported that they don’t find our truth-telling loving. People track their insecurity, anger, depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts back to the truth we so lovingly shared.

We think they’re just angry and bitter, lost in their sins, until someone lovingly drops a “truth” bomb on us — and then we see the shattering effects of speaking the truth in love.

How do we move on from there with the knowledge that no matter our intentions, our word choice, or our tone, our truth-telling offends more than it reconciles? We’re stuck: Silence seems like tacit agreement, which compromises truth. We can’t do that; we’re supposed to be holy and set apart. Speaking up rarely comes across as loving, which, obviously, compromises our call to love. We can’t do that; we’re supposed to be known by our love.

What’s an others-loving, righteousness-pursuing Christian to do?

I’m finding that the problem isn’t necessarily with believing in absolute truths or making judgment calls according to a God-given standard. We all have our beliefs. (Of course, some beliefs are antithetical to love, and many more beliefs make it difficult to love fully.) And the solution isn’t changing our minds, because, again, some beliefs aren’t truthful or good or beneficial and they need to be called out. Nor is the solution merely changing our motives to a more tactful tone. Poison with a spoonful of sugar is still poison.

I think we need to abandon the legalistic idea that (nicely) presenting people with the law is an effective, life-giving thing.

I grew up hearing people talk about God’s Word as life-giving and powerful in and of itself. That’s why people post combative Bible verses on billboards or leave Bibles in hotel drawers or shout about hell on the sidewalk. God’s Word is magical and always applicable in whatever form a person encounters.

This isn’t true. In fact, Jesus mentioned that the Pharisees’ strict adherence to the law set a stumblingblock to them and others. Paul talks about how the law brings death. Even though it’s perfect, even though it’s good, even though it’s right and true, the law brings death.

Why? Because nobody is perfect. The Pharisees, the people waving signs, the church paying for the confrontational billboard, and all the people they want to toe the line — nobody is perfect. It’s not motivational to see how badly we fall short. It’s devastating. It makes us want to rebel or give up. The law cannot bring life, no matter how nicely it’s phrased.

The only reason many Christians see the law as life-giving is because (1) many Christians don’t realize how badly they transgress the law, not with the planks blinding their eyes; and (2), more charitably, the law comes to them at a time of receptiveness and growth.

If someone were to scream at you on the street that you’re going to hell, you’d be offended. If you already believe you’re worthy of hellfire and that’s why you’re in a Southern Baptist Church this morning, the spittle-flecked rant against sin is meeting you where you’re at.

The thing is, Christianity isn’t about keeping the law. It’s about development and life. It’s about bearing with the weaker Christians and holding back condemnation from stronger ones. It’s about judging rightly. It’s about wisdom. Because Christianity understands that nobody can keep the law. That’s why there’s Jesus and grace and forgiveness.

It’s exactly like childhood development.

When a baby is born, he is utterly incapable of walking. It doesn’t matter how nicely or persuasively you explain how mature people must walk. He can’t do it. There’s a whole process of development before he can walk. And for some infants, disability prevents them from walking at all, ever. Reasonable parents support their infant in his development, knowing that working on holding up his head and rolling over all develop into the skills that allow him to walk later on. They don’t even mention walking. It’s pointless, and if their unrealistic expectations start coming out in anger or disappointment, children can even regress in development. Holding up walking as the standard a child must meet even when he’s unable to do so is shaming and damaging.

But there is still a standard. While reasonable parents aren’t even discussing that standard with their crawling baby, it’s important that they know there’s a general developmental milestone children should be meeting within a certain time frame. Without knowing those benchmarks, they could miss warning signs that set their child up for struggles later on. It’d be insane for a parent to ignore the fact that their three-year-old child isn’t walking yet, insisting that it’s fine, that there’s nothing wrong, that it’s just the way she is.

Those developmental milestones are in place not to shame kids unable to reach them but to alert parents to something else that’s wrong.

That’s what the law does for us. It alerts us to what’s wrong. And grace allows us to be wrong, weak, and imperfect, trusting that God will complete the good work he started in us. Grace acknowledges that we start from a place of helplessness and sickness, even death. It allows for a process of salvation. It allows for the celebration of who we are in Christ — competent, wonderful, beloved creations — knowing that we’re going through the natural bumps and setbacks and limitations of immature people growing up.

Just as I delight in my son’s crawling, unfazed that he’s not walking (even though I of course want him to be walking eventually), God delights in who we are now, even if we fall short of the perfect and the mature. (And we do.)

We ought to take God’s perspective — the loving parental perspective — when approaching the weaknesses and imperfections in ourselves and others. This is the way of love: viewing everybody not in terms of how badly they fall short of the law but in terms of which stage of development they’re in. This is the way of grace: celebrating the progress, meeting the needs, and strengthening the capabilities people currently have as a way of paving the way to more growth.

I absolutely do not believe that salvation is a one and done deal that unlocks instant, attainable perfection. That is, I don’t think that making an initial profession of faith enables you to perfectly keep the law just like that.

No, faith rescues us from a legal, accusatory way of perfectionism that holds weak, hurting, broken people accountable to an impossible standard. Faith changes the dynamic between us and God — now we understand that he is not our accuser, but our defender, our lover, our parent, the one who knows us best, celebrates us as we are, and loves us no matter what.

Faith also changes the dynamic between us and the law. Under Christ, it is a beneficial schoolteacher rather than the revelation of our doom. We look to it like a child glancing up to the alphabet chart to remember which way lowercase b goes. We strive toward the goal, we might get frustrated that our handwriting still isn’t where we want, but our eternal salvation isn’t bound up on getting it right then or tomorrow or even several grades later. We’re still learning and growing. We’re still immature. Maturity comes after a long process of development involving lots of failure and imperfection.

How does all of this apply to speaking the truth in love?

Now that the law is more like an elementary spelling book or a developmental guideline than federal law, we need to approach our application of it with wisdom.

My precocious teenage self once theorized that knowledge is knowing things, understanding is knowing how to apply things, and wisdom is knowing when to apply things. I still stand by those distinctions.

We need to speak the truth with wisdom as well as love. Wisdom involves three steps: knowing what’s right and wrong; knowing how to communicate that knowledge of right and wrong in a helpful, loving way; and knowing whether that particular moment is the time to share that knowledge.

Whether it’s beneficial or not to the other person depends not only on the truthful content of your beliefs or your kindhearted motives; it depends on whether it’s what the person needs to hear at that time. Are you, metaphorically, suggesting that they walk when they’re just learning to crawl? Are you asking a pig to fly? Are you throwing pearls before swine or answering a fool according to his folly?

We can all look back on a time when someone said something that stuck with us and changed us for the better. It hurt like heck at the time, but it was true, and it was needed — not only in the sense that we were wrong, but in the sense that we were ready to hear it even if we didn’t want to hear it. We were capable of understanding and processing what was said in a way that was helpful, just like a parent encouraging her one-year-old to take her first steps. It was fifth-grade material given to a fifth-grade student, not a death sentence. It was frustrating and hard, but we could handle it.

That’s why Paul emphasizes showing patience with the weaker brothers and understanding with the stronger. That’s why there’s no condemnation in Christ: we can struggle and flail at our own pace. We can go through the grieving process and recover from trauma and be ignorant and mess up all the time. We can rejoice with those who rejoice instead of reminding them that kids in Africa are starving. We can weep with those who weep without cautioning them to give thanks always. We can meet people where they’re at without worrying that our love will enable them to live sinful lives.

If that all seems complicated, it is. If it seems like we all need to take classes on human psychology, it’s true. If you feel like maybe you’ve said a lot more than you should, you’re probably right.

Tellingly, when we approach truth-telling with wisdom, we likely won’t speak much at all: “When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable, but he who restrains his lips is wise” (Proverbs 10:19).

In the wake of the Me Too movement, I hope every parent commits to making sexual abuse prevention an urgent priority. Our kids need to know they can say no! to anyone wanting sexual contact with them — whether that’s a teen from high school messaging your daughter for explicit photos, an older sibling intimidating a younger sibling into sexual acts, or a youth group leader grooming the middle schoolers in his care.

But in order for a child to say no! and tell an adult, and in order for that child to grow up into an adult who can say no! and contact the proper authorities, she needs more than the cognitive understanding that nobody can violate her body. She needs more than the knowledge of good touch/bad touch. She needs more than the know-how that she can come to tell Mommy and Daddy anything.

She needs self-confidence. She needs courage. She needs a strong sense of self-worth. And she needs the tools and the practice saying no! to anyone who violates her body or gives off an “ick” vibe. She needs an inner conviction that her bodily autonomy matters more than respecting adults or being nice.

None of those things come from a few conversations about inappropriate touching. Those things come from regular practice and experience in everyday life. My concern is, the parenting promoted in our culture regularly undermines the self-confidence, courage, self-worth, and bodily autonomy of our children. When it comes time to stand up for herself or run and get help, her mind will know what to do, but she will shrink in fear and confusion, scared to offend, uncertain of how to assert herself.

This is true for both the ten-year-old and the twenty-year-old: how we parent daily sends stronger messages about our children’s worth, bodily autonomy, and self-confidence than a couple talks about sexual abuse prevention.

Today’s parenting emphasizes compliance in children and ultimate authority in adults. We demand respect for adults at any cost — and by “respect,” I don’t mean treating all people kindly; I mean treating all adults as authority figures with more say over a child’s life than the child herself possesses. If a child crosses an adult by asserting her own thoughts, feelings, and needs, she is treated as less than a person. She loses rights to her personal property (taking away her things for an unrelated infraction), her body (corporal punishment, grounding, time out), and her right to be treated kindly (screams, insults, humiliation, anger).

As a viral Reddit post says,

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person,” and sometimes they use respect to mean “treating someone like an authority.” And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say, “If you won’t respect me, I won’t respect you,” and they mean, “If you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person.”

That’s American parenting in a nutshell.

This creates a dangerous power imbalance between all adults and all children. Adults feel entitled to treat children however they like in order to get the “respect” owed them. Children learn that their own ideas, values, thoughts, and feelings matter less than adults’. They internalize that adults always know better, even if the things they do hurt the child deeply. They learn they must always do what adults say, even if it hurts them, confuses them, or violates their sense of bodily autonomy or fairness. If they don’t do what adults tell them, they are “naughty” and will receive punishment. They fear questioning an adult, lest they be disrespectful. After all, what do they know? They’re just kids.

This is the sort of internal messaging driving a child or a grown adult into fearfully “consenting” to sexual abuse or feeling powerless to say no.

The people who are sexually abusing our children, both young and adult, are rarely strangers. They are older siblings, relatives, family friends, teachers, bosses, significant others, sometimes even parents themselves. They are the people we insist our children respect as authority figures, even if the child brings legitimate complaints about them to our attention. They are the ones about whom we say, “Yes, that’s not fair, but he’s your teacher, so you have to do what he says.” “Yeah, I know you don’t like Auntie’s kisses, but she’s your aunt. You’ll hurt her feelings if you don’t let her kiss you.” “No, it’s not right that Grandma spanked you, but you need to listen to her when she gives you a direction.”

Instead of standing up for our children’s bodies, feelings, and basic right to be treated as a person, we cave to social pressure, fearful of disrespecting or angering other adults.

Successful sexual abuse prevention hinges on dismantling the adult-as-authority/child-as-compliant power imbalance. We dismantle it by honoring our child’s limits; defending our child’s rights to control their bodies and property; respecting the real emotions hidden beneath inappropriate behavior; and giving children practice in conflict mediation.

Sexual Abuse Prevention Tip: Honor Your Child’s Limits

“Stop!”

“Don’t!”

“I don’t want to!”

“NO!”

Few things make authority figures angrier than hearing a kid assert her preferences in a way that shows she values her own thoughts and feelings over our own. In a culture where child compliance is the ultimate virtue, it’s embarrassing when our children refuse to participate in what other children are doing, and it’s humiliating when they do the opposite of what we ask them to do. We worry that other adults will be insulted if the child refuses to hug them, listen to the story they picked, or eat the meal prepared for them. We worry that our kids will grow up anti-social and rude.

But it’s imperative that we honor our child’s internal monitor of danger and dislike, no matter how irrational it seems to us. This is the same internal monitor she will have if someone tries to abuse her. All children feel an “ick” or “danger” factor when encountering sexual abuse. Not all children feel confident in the accuracy of that monitor. If we repeatedly insist that children disregard a strong dislike or fear in favor of social convention, she will learn to doubt the inner voice that helps her determine what’s safe and what’s not safe.

Honoring our child’s fears, dislikes, and assertions includes showing respect and support with our words, tone, and immediacy. It’s not enough to bargain with or bribe the child — “Oh, come on. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s okay!” — and then shrug in defeat. They need immediate validation and support without a hint of teasing, disapproval, or dismissiveness: “I see that you don’t want to join the library story time. Is there something worrying you? You said you don’t know, you just don’t want to. That’s okay. You can stand in the back and watch. I’m going to sit in the circle and listen to the story. If you change your mind, you can come sit with me.”

Any time we insist children ignore their fears and dislikes in favor of pleasing someone else or following social convention, we train them that other people’s desires matter more than their own safety, needs, or preferences. Conversely, every time we honor our child’s refusal to say hello, join the parachute play, or eat the meal Mom worked so hard to prepare, we teach the opposite: My wants, needs, and safety matter more than making other people happy. Mom and Dad won’t get mad at me for standing up for what I want or need. I can listen to what my gut tells me, and if I’m wrong about an initial judgment and decide that it’s safe and okay, I can change my mind. It doesn’t make me a bad or stupid person to listen to my intuition, even if it’s sometimes wrong.

This is exactly the kind of inner conviction and self-confidence we want to create in our children in matters of sexuality and consent: If I can’t give an enthusiastic yes, I will say no. I can always change my mind. I know how to assert myself respectfully and cope with other people’s disappointment. I know I am not a bad, disrespectful, or defiant person for valuing my needs, safety, and preferences.

Sexual Abuse Prevention Tip: Defend Your Child’s Right to Her Body and Property

“Be nice. Give her the shovel.”

“Oh, come on. It’s just a hug!”

“If I see you hitting your brother one more time, I’m giving you a spanking.”

“That’s it! Go to time out and sit there until I tell you you can come out.”

American parenting insists on generosity and respecting other people’s bodies and property, but we do so often at the expense of our own children’s bodies and property. We need a consistent ethic of bodily autonomy and respect that includes everyone, including our children and their property.

Children without a clear understanding of their own rights and property will not be able to give generously. They will clutch their toys and scream, “Mine!” They will hog ten cars and refuse to share one with their sobbing best friend. This vehement refusal to share stems from insecurity and confusion over what really is “mine.” Ironically, the same child who savagely protects his excessive number of toys can become a teenager who caves into unwanted sexual acts because he too isn’t clear on what’s “his” or if “his” is worth defending.

The difference lies in how parents treat this critical developmental stage where children need to differentiate themselves from others, and whether parents continue to support a child’s right to his body and property in the face of others’ disapproval.

Children need clear boundaries on what constitutes “theirs” and what constitutes “others’.” It’s sometimes a difficult line to walk, since parents, teachers, and babysitters are charged with tasks that involve children’s things and bodies. They must wipe and clothe private areas, physically block children from hurting others or themselves, and remove playthings that children use to hurt others or property. Children are more dependent on us for their belongings, safety, and impulse control than adults.

It’s all the more important that we give children as much control as is developmentally appropriate and that we defend our children’s right to control their bodies and property. In areas where it’s inevitable that a parent must intervene for a child’s health, safety, and well-being, this often looks like giving age-appropriate and parent-approved choices: “Do you want to lie down while I change your diaper, or stand up?” “What do you think are good rules for your iPhone?” “You may whack the stick on the ground or the tree, but not on the window. It’s not safe to whack windows; they can break. If you choose to whack the stick on the window again, I will take away the stick.”

Age-appropriate and parent-approved choices still respect children’s autonomy, and they make sense to children. A child will not like Dad taking away his stick and may throw a huge tantrum in protest, but it is fair: Dad gave him clear choices and consequences, and the child made a choice with an unpleasant but natural consequence. If he can’t use the stick safely, he can’t use the stick at all.

It makes less sense when parents take away property or infringe on bodily autonomy as an unrelated punishment. When a parent spanks a child for being disrespectful, it isn’t a fair or natural consequence. It’s an external punishment that leverages fear of pain to get the child to do what the parent wants. When a parent takes away a child’s Legos for hitting his sister, it isn’t a fair or natural consequence. It leverages fear of deprivation to get the child to do what the parent wants.

External punishment that violates bodily and property autonomy can work as a deterrent to bad behavior, but it also teaches the child that they should submit to unfair or illogical things if an adult says so. It teaches them that adults do not have to respect their children’s bodies or property and that it’s futile to protest punishment on those grounds. It also sends conflicting messages: Children can’t take things from others or hit others, but parents can take things from kids and hit children because they’re adults.

Forced sharing is another staple of American parenting that values the disappointment of others over a child’s rights. When a parent insists that their child shares, she sends the clear message that the other child’s feelings matter more than the first child’s right to her property and play. It also sends a dangerous message to the child requesting a toy that his wants matter more than another child’s rights.

Children need to see their parents defending their rights to their body and property. Immediately stop tickling or roughhousing the second the child yells “stop!” or appears in any distress, even if she’s giggling or wants to do it again a few minutes later. Give a child parent-approved choices if she balks at necessary caregiving tasks. Never give away or take away a child’s belongings without her permission, unless it’s for temporary safety reasons. Defend your child’s right to play how she likes, even if it makes another child sad or disappointed.

We want our children to give freely and wholeheartedly without compromising their safety or needs. By respecting their bodily autonomy and property now, we instill an inner conviction and self-worth that will serve them well in both consensual and non-consensual sexual encounters:My body is mine. I can do what I want with it unless it’s unsafe to me or others. I can stand up for myself even if that makes other people feel sad or disappointed. I will only let others touch me if I like it and feel safe. My parents will always defend my right to say no. I can go to them for help if other people will not respect my bodily autonomy.

Why don’t children tell their parents if someone sexually abuses them? They’re terrified that they will get in trouble for “allowing” it or participating in it.

Many children feel that their parents’ love is conditional on their good behavior and that they are “bad” for making mistakes or acting inappropriately on legitimate feelings. “It doesn’t matter if he started it!” parents will snap at their kids. “You are the older one.”

“I don’t care if she yelled at you. You can’t hit her. Go to your room!”

“You know better!”

American parenting often sends the message that if kids do something wrong, their feelings, grievances, and reasons for the inappropriate behavior don’t matter. It also holds kids to an impossibly high standard: If they cognitively know something is wrong, they should be able to stop themselves from doing it.

Children are capable of a lot through practice and support. The key is practice and support. Impulse control originates in the prefrontal cortex, the last part of the brain to develop in children. This is why we can explain things until we’re blue in the face and our kids will still do stupid, inappropriate, or unkind things.

They’re not “being bad.” They’re impulsive and short-sighted because that’s their current developmental stage.

As adults who “know better,” we’re responsible for interpreting children’s behavior, meeting the need they’re trying to convey, and giving them tools to communicate more clearly and respectfully next time.

When we focus on the inappropriate behavior (for example, hitting or yelling “I hate you!”) to the exclusion of the feeling underneath it (“I’m scared,” “I’m mad”) and the cause of that emotion (“He tried to take my truck,” “She’s not listening to my point of view”), we push our kids away from us. This is especially true when we side with adults or our children’s friends, minimizing the harm they caused in order to focus on making sure our children show respect. Our child learns that Mom and Dad will usually side with other people. They won’t believe me, understand me, or support me. I have to be perfect in order for them to care about my feelings and grievances.

When we validate our child’s feelings and point of view and set a limit on inappropriate behavior, we build up an inner conviction in our child of self-worth: My feelings and thoughts matter. If I make mistakes, I can respond differently next time. My parents will support me and understand me even if I make a mistake. I don’t deserve bad treatment from others even if I’m not perfect or treat others badly too.

Abusers capitalize on children’s guilt: No one will believe you. You deserve to be treated this way. Don’t you dare tell anyone. Your parents will hate you for what you’ve done. You’re already a slut, so I can do whatever I want to you.

If a child knows her parents are on her side always, no matter what, those guilt messages won’t deter her. She feels an intrinsic self-worth and conviction in her parents’ support.

Sexual Abuse Prevention Tip: Let Children Practice Conflict Mediation

It’s terrifying telling people no. It doesn’t feel good. Many adults avoid it at all costs, going along with the unpleasant situation as long as possible. We operate on the conviction that we need to be as nice as possible and say yes as much as possible and just be a bit more flexible.

This messaging doesn’t disappear the second an intimidating guy starts giving you unwanted attention. If we set our foot down now, before anything really bad happens, we risk misinterpreting his friendliness as flirtatiousness and embarrassing him; we risk making a scene and looking inflexible and rude; we risk hurting his feelings or angering him.

If we’re not used to setting limits with peers, saying no or stop when it really, really matters will be a Herculean task.

It starts with spats over toys and the shrieks of “he looked at me!!!!” and the unwanted rough play. Parents often swoop in to rescue their child or their child’s victim, handing over the toy the other kid wants, yelling at the kid to stop looking at his sister, banning roughhousing completely. In other words, we set the limits and resolve the conflict.

While it’s great for kids to know that parents will be there to help, parents won’t always be there. Our job is to train kids how to handle conflict independently from us as much as possible.

I once supported two kids trying to cross stepping stones in the opposite direction. “She won’t move!” screamed one kid. “He won’t move!” screamed the other. “I want to go this way!” yelled the first kid. “I want to go the other way!” yelled the second. I could have easily required one or both to get off and let the other pass, but instead I coached them to ask the other to move or suggested that one of them get off and let the other pass. They stood there, asking and yelling at each other to move with no resolution, until they both got bored and ran off together to play.

Whenever a child gets hurt, either physically or emotionally, I ask them what they want to do. Do they want to keep playing but with a new rule against, say, throwing wood chips? Walk away? Confront their friend? If they decide on setting a limit or sharing their feelings, I go with them for support but require that they do the talking themselves.

I try to police kids’ interactions as little as possible unless there’s a real safety issue or a student is violating another kid’s clear or implied limits. When given the chance, they often work things out quite well, even if it’s louder, more disrespectful, and messier than I like. Instead of barging in and solving problems for them, even if kids are upset, I probe their self-awareness about their safety and feelings: “Are you okay with your friend grabbing your arm in this game? Yeah? Okay. You can always change your mind and tell your friend not to if you don’t feel safe. No, you’re not? Okay, tell your friend that you want to play but do not want to be grabbed. Are you okay with her tagging you but not grabbing you?”

This teaches skills clear confrontation skills and the importance of expressing their needs. It’s a courageous act to tell a friend no and mean it, even at the risk of the game ending or their friend’s anger. This also creates a culture where children learn that clearly set limits don’t mean that their friend no longer wants to play or thinks that they are bad people. Limits are good things that enable happiness for everyone.

Isn’t this the exact thing we want for our children when it comes to consent in sex — to values themselves enough to say no clearly, to value others enough to respect the other’s no, to be self-aware about what they like and don’t like and confident and articulate enough to communicate that?

If we want this confidence, clarity, courage, self-awareness, and respect for themselves and others, we need to start now, daily, by supporting peer conflict mediation and respectfully parenting our children.

Abstinence before marriage is decidedly unpopular these days. It’s not sex positive, people say — that is, it perpetuates negative views about sex and human sexual desire. On the flipside, just having sex is seen as sex positive because, well, it doesn’t require you to withhold your sexual desires and it allows you to express your sexuality however you want.

I think neither approaches are inherently sex positive. We’ve focused so much on can you or can’t you, should you or shouldn’t you, that we’re ignoring the real reasons people have sex and all the different parts that make sex either great or traumatic. A just-have-sex ethic fuels rape culture and exploitation of women and minors because it views the act of sex as good regardless of the different components of that sexual encounter. A just-don’t-have-sex-until-marriage ethic ignores the good things of expressing sexuality in beneficial ways even outside of marriage.

Bottom line: marriage isn’t a magical key to great, safe, consensual, meaningful sex, and merely teaching abstinence before marriage is a shell of a sexual ethic — just like having sex isn’t the magical key to great, safe, consensual, meaningful sex, and merely teaching “it’s okay to have sex” is a shell of a sexual ethic.

Instead of teaching either abstinence or participation, full stop, we need to teach sexual integrity — sexual wholeness — sexual regulation. Sexual integrity welcomes our sexuality even before marriage and understands its affects, good and bad, on both ourselves and our partners. Our sexual ethic needs to move seamlessly from before marriage into the marriage bed.

Abstinence education is notoriously incomplete. It’s goal is getting people to not have sex until marriage, and it doesn’t really care how that objective is achieved. It withholds information, spreads misinformation, and catastrophizes sex before marriage. As a result, lots of shame, ignorance, and abuse build up.

Sex before and within marriage is more complicated than that. There are many, many different components of sexual integrity, and when to have sex is only one of them. Those different components shape sexual experiences positively or negatively. They create radically different experiences.

Abstinence is incomplete when it lists “marriage” as the major component to safe, good, and holy sex. Marriage is the ideal, in my mind, but marriage ought to mean a set of specific things: a loving, committed, mutual relationship with the safeguards of supportive community pressure. Marriage at its best is the most committed, intimate, and loving of relationships, providing stability for children, individual personhood, and intimacy.

Not all marriages are like this. In fact, marriage often shelters some of the worst sexual ethics violations. Rape and consent violations occur in marriage. Domestic violence is a huge problem. Unwanted pregnancies can happen.

And conversely, committed, consensual sex can occur outside of marriage. A loving, committed couple having sex before their marriage or a lifelong cohabiting couple are radically different experiences than teens getting it on in the back seat for a one night stand.

Abstaining from what and for what? The answer to that is the answer to whether abstinence is sex positive or not. Abstaining from sex is not sex positive in and of itself, no. But abstaining from sexual relationships or experiences that compromise sexual integrity — whether that’s commitment, love, consent, health, or parental preparedness — that’s sex positive.

The problem is that many of us growing up in the sexual purity movement thought we had a sex positive understanding of abstinence. We were waiting for God’s glorious and good gift of marital sex! How much more sex positive can you get? But we didn’t know anything about sexual integrity or wholeness — about consent and our own sexual natures and truly giving a whole person instead of a girl desperate for male attention and favor. We only knew the goodness of sex in terms of “premarital sex = immoral” and “marital sex = moral.”

Without a concept of sexual integrity and wholeness, we brought a ton of brokenness into married sex — misinformation, shame, ignorance, trauma — and experience a ton of brokenness with married sex — rape, consent violations, manipulative arguments about whether to have sex that night. Shout out to everyone who’s had to Google “how to actually have sex” on their wedding night or shelled out hundreds of dollars for sex therapy or got blamed for their husband’s affair.

This is what happens when we teach abstinence from sex instead of abstinence from an unregulated sexuality.

People have sex for a host of reasons, ranging from really good, healthy ones like “I love and am committed to this person” to “I like sex” to “I only feel worth something with male sexual favor” to “I want to dominate someone.” Sexual integrity and wholeness teach us to be aware of the many reasons we desire sex and sex with this particular person and to regulate those desires in accordance with healthy, safe, loving, committed, consensual, beneficial sexuality. This could look like abstinence from sex or certain sexual acts or going for sex or certain sexual acts, depending on how the different factors line up.

It should be the same for both within and without married sex: considering the desires and needs of both parties, honoring those desires and needs, and using wisdom, love, and grace in responding to them. An unmarried couple deciding whether or not to kiss before marriage should be, in my mind, making the same sort of decision with the same sort of sexual ethic as a wife contemplating turning down her husband for sex that night or debating whether to allow porn in the relationship.

Sex is profound. It affects us and our partners deeply, both positively and negatively. It reveals much about our needs and desires, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Being a sexual person is a normal, good thing. Not all the ways we express our sexuality are normal, good things either for us or for our partners. Saying no or yes to sex is a good thing only in accordance with sexual integrity and wholeness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of Christian spirituality overvalues the distinctly spiritual and undervalues the physical. There are plenty of reasons why this is, but one of them, I’m convinced, is because we’ve silenced or tuned out the voices of people who live an embodied spirituality — women.

Think about it. When you think of great historic Christians who influenced your understanding of spirituality, who comes to mind? Lots of men, who, even if married or fathers, dedicated themselves to full-time ministry or contemplation. Maybe some women, most likely single and dedicated to a life of celibacy and contemplation. People whose days revolve around thinking, reading, praying, silence, solitude. These are the people in our pulpits and seminaries and historical narratives.

The only spiritual experiences we hear are of those whose vocation sets them apart from the physical world as much as possible. Is it any wonder that when we want a closer walk with God, we think that quiet, solitude, contemplation, and Scriptural study are not merely critical components of devotion but THE THINGS that comprise a relationship with God?

Take the ubiquitous quiet time. We’re told that’s God’s time. That’s the place we meet God. If you don’t have that in your life as the TOP PRIORITY, are you even a Christian?

Jamie Wright, in The Very Worst Missionary, recounts her visceral reaction to a Christian mom’s group that encouraged young mothers to give up even more sleep to find quiet time with Jesus. The group was shocked at Jamie’s treasonous insistence that for these moms, sleep was more important than quiet time. But Jamie wanted to know why quiet time had to be quiet.

[W]hen the group leader made that little quip about quiet time needing to be quiet, an unexpected volcano of molten outrage burst forth from the depths of my soul. …

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, then call it ‘loud time’! Call it ‘chaos time.’ Call it what it’s supposed to be, which is ‘intentional time’! … I will not be getting up any earlier. Nope. I’m gonna honor God intentionally in my sleep, because I’m pretty sure God wants me to be the very best mother I can possibly be to my boys. I will listen for God’s voice in the wilderness, and at the water park, and under McDonald’s indoor play structure, because that is my daily loud time and God is faithful to meet me in the chaos” (pages 83-85).

As that mom group demonstrates, the female spiritual life is mostly about how to fit the vocation of the celibate, the contemplative, and the clergy into the insanely busy, physical, exhausting vocations of mom, wife, and housekeeper. Our spiritual reflections are on how to carve out a quiet time or wade through a busy season of life until you can get to another season with more quiet time. Hang in there!

There’s often a sense that our work is meaningful and eternal and spiritual, but only because of its future implications. We’re the cradle-rocking hand that rocks the world — that is, all our work matters because it raises kids who will change the world. We’re the great women behind the great men — our work matters because it enables men to do great spiritual things.

And that’s true. Behind every man who “dedicates his life to God” (as if laypeople don’t), there’s another person — most likely a woman — keeping him fed and cleaning his toilet.

What we women need to realize is that this work matters and is spiritual and eternally significant not just because it enables “greater” spiritual work. This is spiritual work. It is intrinsically meaningful because the human body and the everyday good life are intrinsically meaningful.

Redemption involves saving human souls and also tidying up the living room, bringing order to chaos, bringing balance and beauty to every aspect of life. Traditional women’s work is not lesser, merely a stepping stone to greater spiritual things. It is as great and as meaningful and as dedicated to God as joining a convent or taking priestly vows or shipping off to China as a missionary.

One of the church’s strengths is drawing from the experience of people with different vocations. I’m certainly not advocating that women shouldn’t listen to those with time and energy to contemplate, pray, and study, or that they shouldn’t try to incorporate these practices and insights into their own lives. I’m saying it should go both ways.

The everyday, physical, mundane spiritual practices women have faithfully lived for millennia are critical for a relationship with God. Women’s spiritual lives give unique insight into what it means to live an embodied spirituality. Our experience as mothers provides transformative information about the nature of God as love and about a sacrificial life. What other normal Christian experiences physical, emotional, and mental sacrifices than pregnant, nursing, and primary caretaking mothers? Getting up to a day full of exciting things like scrubbing the bathtub and wiping snotty noses forms the soul in unique ways. Dutifully doing things that must be done again the next day (or five minutes later) teaches us how to live with hope of the resurrection and restoration of all things, in defiance of the fallen world’s decay. There’s no better way of understanding sin and grace and salvation than raising children with love and patience.

The holy practices of cleaning, waiting for a slow toddler, budgeting, driving to a chorus of “are we there yet?” — these things are not only a meaningful, transformative spiritual experience for the women who live them, they are meaningful, transformative spiritual practices for everyone. Even the contemplatives, the celibate, and the clergy.

It is patently false that the contemplatives, the celibate, and the clergy have the edge on spirituality. That is not how an embodied, incarnational Christian spirituality works. All of us need the spiritual experience of women who are too busy and tired from motherhood and homemaking to preach sermons or write blog posts. Not just to hear how on earth they find quiet time for Jesus every morning at the crack of dawn, but how they practice loud time and how we can practice it too.

The thing that pushed me away from Christianity was actually the least Christian of Christian-y things: an ultra-cerebral, hyper-emotional, over-spiritualized spirituality that suppressed or demonized my human embodiment.

The Christian Savior took on flesh and lived thirty years of ordinary everyday life before doing anything remotely heroic. The Christian hope involves the resurrection of our bodies, even the weird, embarrassing, gross parts. The Christian liturgy involved all five senses — kneeling, signs of the cross, incense, weekly edible sacraments, music. The Christian spiritual life looked like loving the guy next door, even if you hated him, and taking care of your family, and living your life, minding your own business, and doing daily, mundane practices like prayer and drinking a little wine for your stomach problems. The most distinctly Christian things about Christianity — the incarnate life and death of Christ, the resurrection, our daily unspectacular worship — require the physical.

What passes as Christian spirituality today looks like none of that.

Long sermons catering to knowing the right things and long periods of worship meant to inspire strong emotions dominate churches. The church’s most common ministries, like Sunday school, involve teaching the right stuff about the Bible.

The evangelical Christianity of my youth saw our relationship with God as something separate than and primary over everyday life. Truly dedicated Christians spent as much time in relationship with God as they could, with daily quiet times (preferably right at the beginning of the day, since Jesus is more important than sleep). How often you consciously thought about Jesus was a sign of how mature you were in your faith, I was told. Moms and secular workers and kids in school got a pass, a pat on the head, an encouragement that “there are seasons when you don’t have as much time for Jesus, and God understands that; just spend as much time as you can with him; there’s grace; don’t worry.”

But I did worry, because when my relationship with God is something separate from the rest of my life, everything that I do ultimately becomes a distraction. Marriage, kids, brushing my teeth — all good but distracting things. And even though I knew there was God’s grace for stuff like that, I felt that everyday life — both its requirements and its pleasures — were guilty little sins that God turned a blind eye to. What did it say about me that I would rather read a novel that didn’t even mention God to shutting my door and praying?

Since my devotion to God was measured by how much I consciously thought about him, spoke to him, and set aside time to him, every time I chose to do something else with my time, I felt like I was betraying him.

Then there was the fundamentalist influence, that required a total separation from and/or spiritualizing of everyday life. Certain enjoyable things were off-limits (like drinking or watching R-rated movies), and enjoying those things revealed a crooked heart more interested in the things of the flesh than the things of the Spirit. It was confusing to get a hang of the exact rules, but I eventually figured them out: intellectual and artistic stuff was okay if it came to the right moral and theological conclusions; caring for your personal appearance was okay if it involved looking good for your husband, making sure men didn’t stumble, celebrating “femininity,” and showing respect to God on Sundays (otherwise it was vanity); hanging out with people was okay if you called it “fellowshipping.” Everything needed to have an explicitly Biblical stamp of approval to call it good or Christian.

Then there was the river of asceticism and dualism from which these evangelical and fundamentalist tributaries flowed: the life of the saints, who gave up everything to go to foreign countries or “do ministry,” or hole themselves away for a life devoted to quiet time. These were the super-Christians, the ones who took Jesus seriously and literally. Again, we lesser peons who drove to work and raised kids and lived in the suburbs got understanding pats on the head that our lives could kind of be like Jesus’s too — but the really serious Christians weren’t afraid to give up everything and go anywhere and dedicate themselves to Official Christian Ministry. That was the ultimate Christian life we needed to work up to.

In other words, our relationship with God was something separate from our everyday life. Our ministry was something separate from our everyday life (unless you were a super-Christian who gave up everyday life for an extraordinary, ministerial life). Our spirituality relied on the cognitive (researching, assenting to, and nicely strong-arming others into believing the right things; consciously thinking about, talking to, or hearing from God), the emotional (feeling the joy, happiness, connection to, and presence of God), and the supernaturally miraculous and huge (obvious ministry, inexplicable miracles).

Yes, yes, there was sometimes room for the everyday life, but it wasn’t the best use of your redeemed life. Maybe self-care was okay if it made you better able to do your ministry, or maybe reading that secular novel was okay if you made you think about God in a different way. Conscious thought about and interaction with God was the definition of Christian spirituality. Explicit serving of others was the definition of the sanctified Christian life.

All of that sounds awesome — but I just wasn’t cut out for that. Quiet times felt destructive to my faith, a place where I begged for God to show up and got silence. The constant giving and going of this always-happy, always-exciting, always-huge, always-others-centered spirituality exhausted me. The duality of wanting so badly to love and serve and worship God by putting him first but needing to brush my teeth or wanting to read a secular novel ate me up.

I felt God’s presence in relationship with people. I wanted my body and my daily needs and my desires and my humanity to be significant to God instead of distractions to my relationship with him. I wanted to unite the spiritual and the physical, the everyday and the supernatural.

Having tentatively lived this spirituality for a couple years, I’m confident in saying that this embodied spiritual life is transformative and healing and 110% Christian. It’s not that conscious theological thought or prayer or quiet times are un-Christian. We are spiritual creatures too, and God is Spirit. Those are Christian acts. They’re just not inherently “more Christian” than physical things.

I don’t hear God speaking into my soul. But I have gained lots of wisdom from the world and people around me, and that is the voice of God. I don’t do Official Christian Ministry. But with every relational interaction, I try to think about how to respect the other person and make peace with them. I don’t have a designated time for Jesus, because I have the opportunity to meet God in every moment and every person. I don’t consciously think about God every second of my life, because he is in all things, and all good things come from him. I don’t verbally pray without ceasing, because my “prayers,” my response to God’s goodness, come in the form of deep-belly laughter and tears and silence. I don’t experience God in a supernatural way, because he entered into the natural and made it holy.

I take care of my body as an act of defiance against death and decay, because I trust that my body will experience the resurrection. I enjoy sex and baby snuggles and stupidly insignificant conversations with my sisters, because God created me to need and find joy in people. He too lives within an eternally Triune relationship. I wash the dishes and make the bed and vacuum the crumbs off the floor, because I reflect God’s image in taming the chaos. I read secular novels and study art by crazy atheists and think about interesting things that non-Christians have said, because the image of God as creator resides in all of us. I take time to care for just me, because God loves me — not primarily as an instrument to serve him or others, but as a beloved child of God.

And I go to church every week, and say the same prayers I said last week, and have some awkward and not eternally significant conversations with fellow churchgoers, because the Christian life is not about the exotic and the emotional and the supernatural, but about the everyday and the repetitive and the incarnational. Sometimes the sermon is really inspiring, or the Eucharist makes me cry, and sometimes I just sit in the pews, unmoved, knowing that in this mundane act, I’m following in the steps of our Lord, who lived a totally ordinary life too.

Many of these thoughts stem from Tish Harrison Warren’s book, Liturgy of the Ordinary.

In my formative days, I read lots of articles calling “me time” selfish. The job of a wife and mother was to give and give and give, these women insisted. Any unhappiness, resentment, or exhaustion about this endless giving was a sign of her pride and selfishness. She didn’t need a break. She needed to give more. The blessing of giving and giving and giving was the only satisfaction she needed in life, and the only respite she was allowed was one quiet time with Jesus — at the crack of dawn, of course.

This is spirituality at its falsest. This is the corpse-stinking spirituality that Jesus railed against when he called the Pharisees white-washed tombs. On the outside, this spirituality sounds so good: how selfless, putting everybody’s needs ahead of oneself! How pious, having all the needs you can’t ignore met by Jesus alone! How can anyone argue with a spirituality like that? But on the inside, it’s just death and decay: frazzled, resentful, tired, cranky, unfulfilled women, always striving and never satisfied.

The only reason they continue like this is because they think their sinful nature brings this dissatisfaction on themselves and that someday God will reward their selflessness.

They’re right that they bring most of this on themselves, what with their refusal to acknowledge their human limits. They’re wrong that God is passing out participation prizes for Most Burnt-Out Woman in the hereafter.

A False Humility

Christians get selflessness and humility wrong. Even C. S. Lewis’s famous correction misses the heart of humility: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”

Christian spirituality’s ultimate goal is not selflessness — that is, it’s not a negation or repudiation of self. It’s redemption, reunification, restoration: all things come together in shalom through Christ. Shalom means more than peace or the absence of chaos. It means wholeness. As one rabbi explains it, “In the Hebraic way of thinking, wholeness is the joining together of opposites. … [T]hat is the source of peace – the knowledge that all my opposing energies are somehow linked and part of a single whole.”

When Christ says he has come to give us life to the fullest, he is referring to this shalom. It’s a reordering. It’s a balancing. And in the context of shalom, humility is a reckoning of how my life affects others’ lives and how that in turn affects the shalom of the whole world.

A selflessness defined as unending giving is self-centered and proud. It ignores two important realities: you have limits, and you are not the driving force in other people’s lives.

A truly humble person recognizes and accepts her limits. She knows she is human. Just as she needs restorative sleep and good food, she needs meaningful self-care. While the anti-me-time articles bemoan the self-centeredness of today’s culture, frankly, I haven’t met a singleperson who practices intentional and meaningful self-care. We all seem to operate at half-power, eating junk, skipping sleep, burning the candle at both ends. We act like we can go forever, like illness and exhaustion and hunger and burn-out are just unfortunate little accidents instead of warning signs that we’re overextending ourselves.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, this is wasting our potential to serve others. We’ve all been there, pouring ourselves out as living sacrifices to one group of people, and then coming home to yell at our husbands and kids before crying ourselves to sleep.

From a perspective of shalom, this is about as unbalanced as we can get. We refuse to accept our mortality. We refuse to accept our bodies and minds as good things in need of love and stewardship, rather than annoying extremities getting in the way of real spirituality.

There is a self-centeredness that says, “I am the center of the universe. Everyone must serve me.” But there’s also a self-centeredness that passes as humility: “I make the universe go round. I must serve everyone.”

Both share an inflated sense of importance in other people’s lives, while ignoring the actual impact we have on those around us. Giving indiscriminately often devalues others. It teaches us to see them as fundamentally helpless, in need of our particular help. It enables them to depend on us in areas they need to depend upon themselves. It takes away chances for them to develop skills and virtues. It’s critical for children and husbands to respect their mom and wife’s space and time: it teaches them generosity, patience, empathy, and, yes, selflessness.

A False Contentment

This is a really weird thing about humans: it’s sometimes harder for us to say no than to say yes. Again, while our culture may applaud self-care, few people practice it. Our understanding of love is codependent and conflict-averse. We’d rather give in to our kids’ and husbands’ demands than stick to our principles. It’s far easier to limp along with everybody else superficially happy than face their displeasure — or the reasons why it’s so hard for us to say no.

When women tell other women to give more as a solution to their burn-out, they’re peddling a false contentment. “It’s just the way it is,” they say. “This is just the season you’re in. Get over yourself and stop looking at other women’s green pastures.”

There’s a grain of truth in this. The world is broken, and life is hard and unfair, and sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about it.

But as Christians, our work is one of redemption. We must see our restlessness and groaning and “ill content” as signs that the status quo is not God’s best. We must be prepared to do the hard work of redeeming and re-balancing that everyday brokenness around us. This starts with our own imbalanced lives.

Often our constant giving and our “just accept it and move on” attitude mask the true issues we need to work on. Do we really need to get over our “selfish” desire that our husband cook dinner once a week, or do we instead need some work on our fear of holding our husband accountable? Do we really need to check that attitude that wishes we could go to the bathroom without tiny kids tumbling in after us, or do we need to deal with childhood abandonment issues that make it impossible for us to disappoint our kids?

While ignoring our emotions and pressing on is difficult, it’s often a cop-out to the harder but more rewarding work of redemption.

A False Gratitude

These anti-self-care women are like the Israelites in the desert. They moan for God’s provision (even if they won’t admit it) when they can just walk out of their tents and collect all the manna they want. They want the relief, but they aren’t willing to take responsibility for getting it.

We often don’t acknowledge how desperately we need something until we get it. We ignore our needs and burn ourselves out and don’t realize it until someone comes along and meets that need. That conversation or that day off or that time when hubby washed the dishes for us provide us a relief we didn’t even know we needed. Thank God for a hubby who occasionally washes dishes!

We treat the meeting of our needs as a luxury instead of a responsibility. We wait for met needs as something that falls into our tent instead of something God requires us to go out and gather.

And by “gather,” I don’t mean ignoring the needs and trying harder. I mean acknowledging our needs and adjusting the balance of our lives so that they consistently get met. God’s provision is miraculous, but in a mundane way that involves our everyday work.

I once read an article by a woman who claimed me time didn’t work because it made her want more time alone. It made her more resentful toward her husband because she was the only one putting the kids to bed and making the dinner and doing the dishes. It put her in a fouler mood. Her solution was to stuff her emotions and maybe get some Jesus time.

I can guarantee you that’s not working for her. Needs don’t go away. They resurface as something destructive — like resentment or health failure.

God made provision for those needs: the hard work of learning to say no, to set boundaries, and to require and accept help from her capable husband. It’s easy to pine away in our tent, stuffing our emotions, waiting for a miraculous provision to drop in our laps. It’s much more difficult to take responsibility for doing our part to meet those needs.

A False Understanding of Sin and Grace

Many Christians believe emotional, relational, and mental needs are sins in and of themselves. And because they are sins, they require censure and punishment. Stop being discontent, be grateful. Quit your whining, be kind. God’s grace is sufficient for you, so be happy about it. Give more. Try harder.

But all sin arises from brokenness. We’re grumpy because we’re tired. We’re discontent because we’re not living the way God desires for us. We whine because we don’t know how to convey our needs in an effective way.

Brokenness is not evil. Brokenness does not respond to punishment or censure. And God’s grace is not a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of living life go down. God’s grace often is the nasty-tasting medicine, but it brings the spiritual life and spiritual health we most crave.

We wouldn’t expect a person on crutches to run at her full capacity. We wouldn’t yell at a cancer patient to get off her butt and do the dishes. We understand that broken and ill people operate on lower limits, and the only way they get better is to give them the time and space they need to heal.

This spirituality of stuffing your emotions and giving more is like demanding that a woman run on a broken leg. A spirituality that calls self-care “selfish” is like harassing a cancer patient for being sick.

Healing is not a walk in the park, to be sure. It involves waiting, inconvenience, tears, setbacks, unpleasant medicine, therapy, courage, and grit. It’s not all bubble baths and massages and shopping days at the mall (if any). But all healing takes understanding, time, and a break from serving others.

God’s grace invites us to acknowledge our brokenness in all its unloveliness. It allows us to prioritize our pain as meaningful and our healing as important. It allows us to take sick days, to slow down, and to ask others to help us in embarrassingly intimate ways.

A False Provision

Women who deride self-care as selfish say that the only thing they need is Jesus.

The surprising thing about Christianity is yes, it’s a spirituality of giving, but it’s about God’s giving to us first. We love because He loved us. That order is important. The strong hold up the weak, the wise teach the foolish — and all strength and wisdom comes from God.

He is gentle with the broken. He values the burnt-out. His burden is easy. He prioritizes rest, to the point where he wrote it in stone: ON THE SEVENTH DAY YOU SHALL REST.

And as Jesus said, man was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.

You were not made for spirituality — that is, for endless days of sacrifice. Spirituality was made for you, to heal you, restore you. Out of that healing, you heal others.

If you mix up that order, you get the hypocritical religion of the Pharisees that Jesus decried. The worst part? It’s a false righteousness, because all of us are broken and none of us can be strong without true healing. It sounds good to ignore yourself and prioritize other people’s needs and desires by default, but that isn’t even a real possibility. At the worst, you will die in some capacity. At the best, you won’t experience the fullness of a whole, healed life.

If you ignore your emotional, mental, and relational needs, if you rally to push through without true rest and healing, they will resurface again and again — or live just under the surface, in a pit of anxiety and stress.

Listen to your resentment and burn-out and angry fights with your husband. They are symptoms, God’s invitation to heal. And yes, that will definitely involve some “me time.”

I noticed something weird about a year ago. All day, while I sat at home, I had a million different things buzzing in my head that I wanted to share with my husband. I was dying for someone to talk to. But by the time my husband walked through the front door, that part of me shut off with the click of the closed door.

“Hi,” I’d say.

“Hi,” he’d say back. “How was your day?”

I thought of all the million things I had wanted to share with him. There were too many. It was too hard to catch him up. I was too tired. “I don’t actually feel like talking about it.”

And that’s how our evening conversations went. Those three boring sentences, followed by parallel lives.

What on earth was wrong with me? I never stopped talking. I always wanted to blab on in detail. There was no conflict or hostility in our relationship. My desire to connect just dried up the second I saw him.

Clearly, yeah, I was burnt out. Some sleep would help, for sure; some alone time. But I’d been alone all day. I’d had plenty of “me time.”

As we’re both introverts, my husband and I naturally made space for each other’s need to be alone and separate — so much space that we couldn’t easily reconnect. When we forced conversations and dates on a burnt-out soul, we just got more frustrated with each other.

After awhile, I realized that it wasn’t just solitude and separateness that we needed. The fix wasn’t indiscriminate together time. We needed meaningful self-care.

Sarah Bessey says self-care is what makes you come alive, “what fills the well of your soul.” It’s the opposite of self-comfort, which she describes as “numbing”: “the Netflix binges, the bad food, the laying on the couch for a day of reading” (though those can be soul-filling in moderation).

This was our problem: we spent our “alone time” doing numbing things, and came up empty during our “together time.”

Why Date Night Doesn’t Work for Introverts

Have you ever scheduled a date night and found yourself wanting to do nothing instead?

Scheduled date nights are made for extroverted couples — couples who easily come alive just by being together. Together time for burnt-out introverts ends up exasperating both parties: the burnt-out introvert feels irritated by the energy and talkativeness of the other spouse, and then the “filled and alive” spouse, ready to connect, feels rejected. It’s like the classic husband-wants-sex-but-wife-says-ugh-please-no situation, except with everything instead of just sex.

Actually, female sexual desire is a great way to look at the introverted couple dilemma. According to Emily Nagoski, author of Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, every individual (even the guys) possesses a sexual “brake” and a sexual “gas pedal.” Sexual brakes are things that turn off sexual desire, even if your sexual gas pedal is held to the floor.

That’s exactly what was happening with poor old introverted me: I was gunning my relational gas pedal, what with all the excitement to share my thoughts with my husband — but unbeknownst to me, other things were slamming the brakes. Emotional intimacy felt nearly impossible, and the thought of trying to fight those brakes exhausted me.

More Then Solitude

I’ve thought for a long time that simply being away from people would release those brakes. That’s what worked in college, when we started dating. But what I didn’t realize is that the college setting provided me the stuff that filled my soul in a way that sitting at home alone with a sink of dishes did not.

When I was away from my then-boyfriend during college, I was having amazing conversations with my girlfriends, thinking about interesting things, and involving myself in activities I loved. Those conversations, relationships, and activities filled me up, helping me come alive and ready to engage with my then-boyfriend.

Now that we’re married, lots of things I did hit the brakes on emotional intimacy: working full-time, the stress of adult life, housework, small talk with coworkers or hardly any interaction with adults at all, and, ironically for an introvert, spending too much time alone or alone with a non-communicative infant.

Thinking I just needed more alone time, I spent evenings mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or bingeing Netflix. Those things numbed me from the exhaustion I felt, but they weren’t restorative.

For both my husband and me, unregulated screen time is the thing we turn toward as a numbing agent. He plays his computer games, I putz around on the internet. It not only fails to fill the well of our soul, it saps our desire for intimacy even more. It messes with our headspace, to the point where all I’m thinking about is drama on the internet and all he’s thinking about is Fortnite. Great, we think. We live the lamest lives, and we don’t feel like sharing those lame lives with a lame person who just does lame stuff all day.

Trying to connect with burnt-out, boring person is a big emotional brake in itself — as is trying to share your burnt-out, boring self.

The biggest thing we’ve done for our marriage is prioritizing self-care — not self-comfort, but meaningful self-care. We prioritize it individually, and we prioritize it as a couple.

So far, that looks like a few different things:

(1) Before launching into a deep conversation or another meaningful attempt at emotional intimacy, we check in with the other spouse about how they’re feeling. “Are you able to have this conversation right now?” I ask a lot (because I’m the talker in our relationship). Sometimes my husband will say no, not really, he wants to do this thing right now. I know that he means he’s burnt out, and trying to focus on a really intricate and involved thing like his wife’s conversations (cough) will not fill his soul. Sometimes he does his own thing all evening, and I put off the conversation until the next day. Sometimes he does his thing for a while and emerges a little later, refreshed and ready to interact. On rare occasions, sometimes he’s engrossed in a project for most of the week.

I respect his assessment on what he needs and is able to give. If I really need to talk to somebody, I either communicate to him the importance of my needs and let him reassess, or I find somebody else to talk to.

(2) Even though I respect his final assessment of his needs, I’ll check in to see if the activity engrossing him is really filling his well, or just numbing his burn-out. I can tell the difference between long hours that result in a buoyant attitude, excitement, and productivity, and long hours that result in grumpiness, irritation, and even more exhaustion. Part of prioritizing meaningful self-care is holding each other accountable to actually do meaningful self-care.

(3) Even though I think it’s important for couples to hold each other accountable, I take responsibility for filling my soul well. I know that I can’t function in relationship with my husband if I’m burning myself out with busyness or meaningless “me-time.” I’m (trying to be) really intentional about knowing my limits, setting my boundaries well before those limits, and doing the things that make me come alive. I count meaningful alone time — intentionally not doing housework or playing with the baby — as part of the wife-and-mother job description. If I’m trying to be the best wife, mom, and human I can be, pooh-poohing meaningful “me-time” as selfish seems absolutely irresponsible to me.

(4) On Thursdays, we turn off screens. It’s not a date night, per se, and we started it simply as a way to kick our screen addictions, but it’s evolved into a night where it’s almost guaranteed that we’ll connect well. Our headspace is free, there are no distracting people or things via the world wide web, and we naturally gravitate towards each other. It’s almost too easy: merely removing screens puts us in a mental space where we share deep conversation, quality together time, and lots of laughs. I look forward to Thursdays every week.

Of course, since it’s not strictly a date night, sometimes being untethered to screens results in working on separate projects — that is, we get in meaningful self-care. Either way, it’s a good mid-week reset.

(5) Our introvert date night is technically Wednesdays, but we don’t call it date night, and we’re not really consistent about it. We just do not have the energy to plan or do the stereotypical date nights — dress up, go out, get away, or even plan a more structured night in. That’s not our style and never has been. Instead of fighting that, we’re embracing it. We’ve been trying out a date night at our speed — watching documentaries and discussing them. Mostly it’s not working, and I fall asleep halfway, but it’s a good thought. We connect more on the weekends when my husband isn’t trying to squeeze in his refueling time between family time, dinner, chores, and sleep.

Let’s Hang Out!

About

Ezer is a lifestyle blog for egalitarian Christian women. Our readers are intelligent and compassionate, interested in the lives of others and engaged with the ecumenical Christian tradition. read more